Recovering

It’s been a bad time. No one had a good year in 2020, but I have to say I had a particularly bad one. My husband and I split in August, so I moved back to Texas to live with family. Because of the move, I got behind in my classes, and then my mental…

2019 Reading Survey

Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love, but didn’t: Grotesque, by Natsuo Kirino Most surprising (in a good way): A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan Book you recommended to people most: The Republican Brain, by Chris Mooney Favorite new author you discovered (and have now read more…

2018 Reading Survey

Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love, but didn’t: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One, by Amanda Lovelace Most surprising (in a good way): ME, by Tomoyuki Hoshino Book you recommended to people most: The Long Way to a Small,…

2017 Reading Survey

Now that I’ve finally gotten around to it . . . Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love, but didn’t: Jane, Unlimited, by Kristin Cashore Most surprising (in a good way): That Old Ace in the Hole, by Annie Proulx Book you recommended to people most: Dark Money, by Jane…

Best Books of 2017

It was a pretty good reading year, I guess? It’s hard to say, because I read some really outstanding books about some really fucked up things, and my reasons for reading them were upsettingly practical. The majority of my reading fell into two categories, nonfiction (including a few biography/memoir) and literary fiction by women. I’ve always read…

And the Winner of 2017 Is: Audiobooks

I am so excited about the queue I have waiting for me in my Overdrive app, already checked out and downloaded. A defining characteristic of my reading this year has been the number of audiobooks (and the excellence of them). I started a new job in May, moving from the circulation deartment to technical services….

New-to-Me Authors in 2017

I switched the topics for this week and two weeks from now, because I can’t list my favorite books until I’m sure the year is over. Authors I’d been intending to read for a long time, and finally got to in 2017: Angela Davis Charles Dickens (I’d read A Christmas Carol before but this was my first…

Reader’s Room Winter Challenge

I started following The Reader’s Room almost exactly a year ago, about a month after they’d begun their 2016 winter challenge. It was a scavenger hunt, and it sounded really fun, and I came across it the very day of the deadline for one of the items on the list. So I joined, and I spent…

Best Books of 2016

There are so many, which is funny given how garbage a year it was in general. I didn’t review all of them, unfortunately, but I’ve linked to those I did, and I wonder if at some point I might go back and do the ones that have really stuck with me. (It always bothers me…

Top Books of 2016 So Far

It’s June, so it feels like we’re halfway through the year, but also it’s only the beginning of June, so really only five months have passed. If this post is any indication, I am going to have a hard time narrowing down my “best of” lists when January 2017 rolls around. Despite my falling into…

2015 Reading Survey

I found this survey on another book blog, and I never say no to a book survey—especially since all I want to do in the first weeks of January is  keep thinking about the books I read last year! Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love, but didn’t: Bad Feminist, by…

Best of 2015

This was a year of comics and biographies/memoirs for me. Most of the time I would say the bulk of my reading is fiction, some combination of adult and YA or middle grade. Not in 2015. In fact, if I had to pick only one book to call my ultimate favorite of the year, it’d…

FABClub Challenge 2015

In September I joined a Goodreads group that focuses on reading books by female authors. I decided they were probably a good fit when I looked at their reading challenge for this year and saw that, although I hadn’t known about it, I had already completed three-fourths of the challenge; there were only a few categories for…

2014 Stats

Number of books read: 208 Of those… 48 were adult fiction 26 were adult nonfiction 22 were young adult 28 were middle grade approximately 70 were children’s picture books 6 were juvenile nonfiction 32 were graphic novels 15 were audiobooks I reread 24 books: the Harry Potter series, The Poisonwood Bible, Mary Poppins, Fun Home,…

Best and Worst of 2014

It’s so much fun, at the end of a year, to look back at all the great things I read and remember how much I loved them. I tried to put together a top ten list, but I got eight and then had a five-way tie for the last two spots, so I’m just going…

Reading Writers of Color

Mostly incidentally, I’ve spent this year reading books by and about women. I thought about doing #readwomen14 and decided I couldn’t really commit to it—because I tend to get stressed out over limitations on what I can read, and end up feeling like I’m doing a chore rather than enjoying myself—but then it kind of…

Best of 2013

My favorite thing I read in . . . January: picture books by Peter H. Reynolds February: Kindred, by Octavia Butler March: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera; The Hope Chest, by Karen Schwabach; and the picture books of Leo Lionni April: The Runaway Princess, by Kate Coombs May: Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett June: Divergent,…

Favorite Books of 2011

Best YA and Middle Grade The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak A brilliant novel about a German girl during World War II. Interesting fact: It’s narrated by Death. The second of Zusak’s books I’ve read and loved. Because of Mr. Terupt, by Rob Buyea One of the best books, YA or otherwise, I’ve read in…

My Favorites of 2012

Teen and Adult Fiction Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver—I found this totally enthralling in a really quiet kind of way. Bitterblue, by Kristin Cashore—speaking of enthralling… Possibly my favorite book of the year. Withering Tights, by Louise Rennison—not quite as fantastic as Georgia, but similar, and still great. Catherine, Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman—my favorite medieval…

#readwomen2014

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that, although women read more than men, and books by female authors are published in roughly the same numbers, they are more easily overlooked.” I just read this article from the Guardian about gender disparity in the book industry, which reveals itself in surprising ways. Books by women will get flowery,…

2014 Halfway Point

Of the 97 books I’ve read so far this year, 66 were by women, and 47 have female protagonists (something like six or seven were books of poetry or others that don’t have protagonists). On the one hand, that’s twice the number of books by men, but on the other hand, I’ve lost some of…